Please do this before you proceed to the next stage, you will not want to regret for losing these useful crafts.

Now that you have keep your precious craft in safety, we shall proceed to next stage.

BASIC

You can go into forge by swiping upward to get to the guild/JO/MP map. The area to enter the forge is at the bottom left corner (circled as shown below).

In the forge, you will find that you have 2 options:

Forging core

Forging essence

Core is essentially the base of your craft. Core determines your craft's rarity, type (game mode), restriction and charging condition. I will talk more about it in the next section.

Essence on the other hand contains a skill. Core by default have no skill and only have some empty slots. You can embed essence into these slots and the core will then have the skill holds by the essence.

CORE

To create a core, simply go and choose forging core in the forge interface.

To forge a core, you need to use 3 crafts/3 essences as materials and materials will disappear after the forging. (That's why i ask you to add your craft to favourite at the very beginning of this guide)

According to MH, the higher the rarity of your material, the better the chance for your to get higher rarity craft. However, it is actually possible to get 3★ core with 1★/2★ craft. Without large no. of data, it is difficult for me to determine the probability. Anyway, core is actually treated as craft so if you get core that you don't like, you can always reuse it to forge another core. If you are using 3 3★ crafts/cores as material, it is 100% guaranteed to obtain a 3★ core.

For type, restriction and charging condition, it is totally randomize so all you can do is bet on your luck to get something nice.

Next is something a bit tricky, what is meant by a nice craft. Here is my personal guideline in determining quality of a core:
1) Rarity. The higher the rarity, the more skill you can equip and you have better multiplier from craft score as well. Nothing much to discuss, always aim for 3★ core.
2) Restriction. In ideal case, craft without restriction will be the best. However, it may be a bit difficult to get it so core with only race restriction or attribute restriction is also not bad. In general, god restriction craft is good for most mono team (greek, norse, babylon, hegemony are all based on god leader).
3) Type. This determines the game mode and you obviously want to use 1 that you can get high score consistently like connection, reflection and slashing. I personally use all my transposition craft as forging material because seriously i never use them besides for craft challenge.
4) Charging Condition. If your core is for offensive team, do not use 1 that is receive damage type since you won't get hit much. Also be careful with dissolve X runes type because it indirectly restrict your attribute. 1/3 of total charging rate come from leader craft and you definitely do not use a craft with a bad charging condition. Dissolve any rune type is generally the best, followed by 4 or more combos and launching attack (be careful when you are using novalis/ML/yu rou). Dissolve X rune is only good if you want to use it in a mono team.

ESSENCE

To create an essence, you also need to use 3 crafts/3 essences as materials. However, unlike core, you can decide the rarity of your essence. Right now, there is no data to show that higher rarity essences will have better skill so I will not talk about it. However, rarity of your essence will affect embedding which I will discuss in the next section. In order to forge 3★ essence, you can only use 2★/3★ craft/essence as material.

As mentioned previously, essence contains skill and unlike core, it is not totally random. There are some rules to it.

There are 4 categories of skills:

Offensive

Defensive

Special

Convert

When you forge a core with 3 crafts, the leftmost craft's highest tier skill (the one require highest score to activate) will determine the essence skill category. For example, if the leftmost craft's highest tier skill is team ATK + 20%, the resulting essence skill will be in offensive category.

Below is data collected by Chinese forum for value range for craft skills. The data is still incomplete and there may be some empty spaces/incorrect upper or lower limit value as all these are based on what collected by players. Some are left blank because there is no player manage to get it in that category yet.
Source: http://forum.gamer.com.tw/C.php?bsn=23805&snA=513227&tnum=24

Offensive

1★

2★

3★

For 1 turn, team ATK + X%

10≤X≤13

18≤X≤39

For 1 turn, team ATK & RCR + X%

3≤X≤4

3≤X≤17

15≤X≤30

For 1 turn, A attribute's ATK + X%

10≤X≤30

15≤X≤40

23≤X≤50

For 1 turn, R race's ATK + X%

10≤X≤30

15≤X≤40

23≤X≤50

For 1 turn, A attribute's ATK against B attribute + X%

14≤X≤46

25≤X≤63

41≤X≤100

For 1 turn, A attribute members attack once additionally with X% of self attribute ATK.

10≤X≤24

15≤X≤35

23≤X≤50

Defensive

1★

2★

3★

For 1 turn, team recovery + X%

3≤X≤14

10≤X≤30

18≤X≤40

For 1 turn, R race's recovery + X%

10≤X≤27

15≤X≤20

16≤X≤50

For 1 turn, heal X% of total HP.

16≤X≤38

25≤X≤58

40≤X≤89

For 1 turn, reduce damage received by X%

15≤X≤43

25≤X≤64

40≤X≤90

For 1 turn, leech X% of damage dealt to enemy, to the max of 50% of total HP. (Cannot stack)

1≤X≤10

For 1 turn, damage received will not lead to defeat.

Verified

For 1 turn, dodge A attribute's enemy's ATK.

Verified

Delay A attribute's enemy's action by X turns.

1≤X≤3

For 1 turn, heal X amount of HP.

1244≤X≤4472

3049≤X≤9686

7047≤X≤17405

Special

1★

2★

3★

For 1 turn, reflect X times of damage received as attribute-less full attack.

3≤X≤13

10≤X≤30

23≤X≤50

For 1 turn, inflict X amount of A attribute's damage to a single enemy. (Ignore defense)

1126

10326≤X≤37779

25116≤X≤96717

For 1 turn, inflict X amount of attribute-less damage to a single enemy.

9111≤X≤23477

75149≤X≤245947

125471≤X≤499122

For 1 turn, inflict X amount of attribute-less damage to all enemy.

8665≤X≤11132

50460≤X≤132173

76360≤X≤298076

For 1 turn, X% of damage ignore initial shield.

11≤X≤78

For 1 turn, X% of damage ignore penta-attribute shield.

20≤X≤20

5≤X≤77

For 1 turn, X% of damage ignore puzzle shield.

5≤X≤78

For 1 turn, ignore attribute relation.

Verified.

Reduce X R race members' active CD by Y.

1≤X≤3, 1≤Y≤2

1≤X≤4, 1≤Y≤3

1≤X≤5, 1≤Y≤3

Reduce X A attribute members' active CD by Y.

1≤X≤3, 1≤Y≤2

1≤X≤4, 1≤Y≤3

1≤X≤5, 1≤Y≤3

For 1 turn, convert single attack to full attack.

Verified

For 1 turn, reduce all enemy's DEF by X%

15≤X≤24

25≤X≤67

40≤X≤90

Convert

1★

2★

3★

After craft activation, convert A runes to B runes.

Verified

Verified

Verified

After craft activation, convert X columns of runes to A runes.

1≤X≤1

1≤X≤1

1≤X≤2

For a 3★ core, it will have 1 slot for each 1★, 2★ and 3★ essence so we need to forge essences of all rarity and not only 3★ essence to fill up the core slot.

EMBEDDING ESSENCE INTO CORE

To equip essence into your core, simply go to your craft inventory and click on the core, then choose embed to proceed to embed interface.

In each slot, the rarity of the essence that can be embedded will be shown explicitly and you can only equip essence that is same rarity as that slot. No. of slots of a core is exactly the same as the rarity of your core.

You can also remove essence from the core to empty the slot for other core. However, doing so will break the removed essence so avoid it as much as you can.

CORE & ESSENCE MANAGEMENT

From V11.1 onwards, advance and extra level of weekly stage has chance to drop core at boss level. So, in the future, we will be able to farm more core. However, these cores will not be of high quality since they are mostly 1★ or 2★. Here are some ways to use them.

As mentioned in essence section, we can decide on rarity of essence we want to forge and when we use 3★ materials only to forge, the resulting core/essence is also 3★. There is some way to use all these core drop to control the rarity of core/essence you forge.

For 1★ core, use them to craft 1★/2★ essences, depending on your need.
For 2★ core, use them to craft 3★ essences only. Once you get 3 3★ essences that is not useful (you will still want to keep those that are useful), you can use 3 of it to forge a 3★ core with 100% chance.
When you have 3 useless 3★ cores from previous steps, use them to reforge another core which is 100% 3★ as well.

A general flowchart to illustrate the process.
Take note that this is just a general guideline. For example, if you already have the 3★ cores you want and want to get 3★ essences for it ASAP, then you may want to forge 3★ essences using 3 3★ essences instead.

SUMMARY

Just to summarize important points above in a few lines:
1) For core forging, the things that are varied are rarity, race restriction, attribute restriction and charging condition. The only things controllable at this part is you are guaranteed with 3★ core when you forge using 3 3★ cores/essences, the rest are totally random so have fun rolling your desired core.
2) For essence, rarity is controllable and only 2★/3★ cores/essences can be used to forge 3★ essence. Skill category is also controllable by the leftmost craft/core/essence's highest tier skill category (for essence it is just that 1 and only skill). However, there is no way to control what is going to come out within the skill category so once again, have fun rolling.
3) We can embed essence into core through embedding and once essence is embedded, there is no way to retrieve it out but we can embed another essence into the same slot at the cost of losing the original essence inside that slot. So, think carefully before you embed your essence into a core.

For people who prefers video explaination, here is one done by VVV using MH account. (OMG, that amount of crafts!!!)

(03-15-2016, 09:57 AM)Joaqs Wrote: The craft cores only drop from search for the inviter extra or can they drop from any bi-weekly extra?

According to patch note, it is any advance or extra stage.
From what i observed, previously, when boss is defeated, we can get card/coin chest/soul, most likely we now have an additional option of getting core as well.

However, i am not so optimistic about the core quality. If you want some nice core, you will need to forge it yourself, the core drop is just providing us with the raw material.